The `90s Horn In On A Teen Tradition

December 07, 1992|By Bob Greene.

PARKERSBURG, W.VA. — You, like many of us, may have grown up in an era during which there were certain rules about what you did when you wanted your friends to join you for the evening, or when you picked up a girl at her house for a date.

Actually, there weren`t ``certain rules,`` plural. There was one rule, singular:

You didn`t honk.

You didn`t honk because it tended to drive parents crazy. If you were a teenage guy standing around the house in the evening, and your buddies pulled up and leaned on the car horn to summon you, you could look at your father`s face and see it turning purple. And-especially-if you were a girl, and your date came to pick you up and honked the horn instead of knocked on the door, your dad was likely to threaten to forbid you ever to see the guy again.

Honking was rude. Honking outside the house was forbidden. People did it all the time, of course. But just because they did it didn`t make it any more acceptable with your parents. ``If that kid comes to this house one more time and honks on that horn. . . .`` You knew the routine.

``My own father was adamant on the subject,`` said Bob Hattman, the principal of Parkersburg Catholic High School in this Ohio River town of 33,000. ``My father drilled it into us: If you wanted someone, you were not allowed to honk for them. You went up to the door and asked for them. My father said that car horns were for honking at other cars, not for getting people to come out of their houses.``

Hattman, 46, was explaining this in the context of something that happened recently with his own teenage son. To put it in perspective, he was talking about how his dad would react back in 1964 when there was the sound of a honk outside the Hattman house.

``My dad would not permit us to go outside,`` Hattman said. ``The rule was that if someone wasn`t polite enough to come up to the door, then we were not allowed to respond to the honk. It was bad enough when we knew it was our buddies waiting for us out there, and we couldn`t go out. But when it was a girl. . . .``

That was worse?

``Of course,`` Hattman said. ``In 1964, girls were usually much too shy to come knock on a boy`s front door. They might work up the nerve to honk outside your house, but they would be embarrassed to come knock for you. And it killed me to know that a girl was honking for me, and that I wasn`t allowed to go out to her car.``

Nevertheless, the lesson that Hattman`s father taught him-honking for someone is rude-stuck with him. ``To this day, I won`t honk at someone`s house,`` he said. ``Even at the house of a close friend or relative, I will get out of the car and go up to the front door.``

He has imposed the same rules on his own children: No honking. If a Parkersburg teenager pulls up in front of the Hattman house and honks, the Hattman kids are not supposed to respond.